Report: 1 In 4 US Homes Worth Less Than A Year Ago

Yeah, the Federal Reserve and the Feds have made all the right moves. Good grief.

This does not come as welcome news to this homeowner. But it’s not surprising. Even in my hometown, 90 miles outside of one of the few cities not clocked by the Great Recession, Washington DC, even as bulldozers plow new ground for new home sites not far from me, one can feel a cooler wind blowing through the real estate market. I’ve watched it like a hawk for the past 18 months and the market feels very strange. The best word is probably “uneasy.”

I also drive to Washington all the time. I have family who live much closer to the city and one feels the cooler (not even cool, certainly not cold) breeze there too. This in a place which barely hiccuped after the 2008 Crash. I will be up near DC this weekend and I’ll do a little research. The attached article says things are challenging in much of the metro area. More challenging than maybe I thought.

Regardless, what we are seeing is likely a new stage in the housing “recovery.” We had frozen solid and people being turned into the streets. Then we had the long delayed thaw. Then near optimism. Now something new, but it’s too early to say what. It doesn’t feel like we are building on optimism though.

But trust your realtor. They’ve got your best interests in mind. Ahem. (The real estate economists are even better.)

(From CBS)

The latest findings from Zillow suggest housing market values have declined over the past year. Northeast markets like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia have seen price declines of more than 40 percent, as reported by CBS News. Metro areas in the Midwest like Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cincinnati and Cleveland, experienced declines of more than 30 percent.

“It’s easy to say the recession is over when a third of the biggest markets are more expensive now than ever before, but we’re still seeing a number of homes losing value,” Svenja Gudell, Zillow’s chief economist, said in a statement. “The reality is there are still areas lagging behind in the recovery.”

Dallas, San Francisco, and Denver saw double-digit increases last year, but this year they experienced single-digit percentage price declines.